You can substantially increase your MATLAB figure performance by using OpenGL rendering. Put this in your startup.m file:
set(0, 'DefaultFigureRenderer', 'OpenGL');
You can check if MATLAB has detected your hardware by using:
>> opengl info
Other relevant figure properties are:
>> set(gcf,'Renderer','OpenGL') >> set(gcf,'RendererMode','manual')
Warning: this breaks saving EPS files as vectorized figures.
11/8/11